To your point, I believe this why is we need to be careful when describing things like many fields of social science as a “science”. It’s more “social educated guesses” than real science.
Social sciences demanding to be taken as concrete as rigid sciences is a problem today I think. We even see them dismissing actual science in some cases not through falsification but through using their own theory to “prove” certain science is “problematic” of heterodox therefore restricting knowledge.
They demand to be taken as seriously, not as concrete, in my experience. Which is fair, we can maybe reach something like what is described in this article eventually - but as Turchin himself put it, it would not exist without History. If we are to devalue social sciences, we are giving up on ever expanding that knowledge.
Should we take religions seriously then? They demand it anyhow.
I do not mean to dismiss the entirety of the humanities or social sciences (or religion for that matter!) I do get concerned however with their motivations and the power they wield over public policy and politics in general. A certain claim to the truth they don’t really have.
I also find it curious that most elite universities and scholars come to more or less the same conclusions regarding subjects that aren’t falsifiable. You’d expect this to be the case in the hard sciences (reproducibility is vital) but not in others. For instance, in religions we can see great divergence. Even in the way economic theory (another thing that isn’t science but often claims to be) has differing conclusions based on the same observations.
I also see today in the application of some of these social sciences that asking to debate or to ask for more evidence is taken as a challenge to it and in fact evidence that the theory is right. See some national best selling books from this year, for example.
At what point do social sciences look more like religion than “science”?
Social sciences demanding to be taken as concrete as rigid sciences is a problem today I think. We even see them dismissing actual science in some cases not through falsification but through using their own theory to “prove” certain science is “problematic” of heterodox therefore restricting knowledge.